Living with roommates can be fun … and more than a little frustrating. Have you ever walked into the kitchen and felt crumbs under your feet, and wondered when on earth your roommate was going to sweep? Or, wished you didn’t have to cook? These days, this doesn’t have to be a rite of passage that comes with living with roomies.
Jules Malseed-Harris, one of the co-founders of the app, was suffering through his own version of roomie hell when he created a game in his sharehouse to avoid that: housemates had to earn points every month, but they could do it any way they wanted — the cooks who’d rather stand over stove than clean-up could, and no-one could take issue with that.
In 2013, along with Oliver May, Jules decided to focus on creating Fairshare. The app is designed to ensure that everyone in a sharehouse is appreciated and their contributions visible. With the app, roommates can see what others are doing to ensure they have a clean bathroom, or a mowed lawn and know that it’s time to contribute to the house, without getting into a fight with someone about it.
Jules was kind enough to answer some questions for me about this app.
I was reading on your blog about how this app came to be. I have to ask — how did you convince your housemates to trial the very first Fairshare point system?
At the beginning, we had real issues with the classic share house problem: the tragedy of the commons. People took care of their own rooms but never cleaned the kitchen and bathrooms, rarely did communal shopping, and only cooked shared meals on special occasions. After a couple of years, we all got tired of it. Given our roster based system wasn’t working, and everyone was seeking a positive change, it made sense to try something new.
The whole house sat down together, including my co-founder, Oli May, and we democratically determined what every household task is worth and documented it in a spreadsheet that we could print out each month. Everyone was able to do what they want, when they want, and with all the invisible contributions made visible, there were no longer any arguments so we stuck with it.
Can you describe how it works?
Fairshare is an app with three parts. The first section is designed for organising housework. Any housemate can add a task – from cleaning to household shopping to communal cooking – and you can encourage each other for jobs well done and earn points for your contribution. Fairshare’s self-learning algorithm keeps track of which tasks still need to be done and orders them by priority.
The bookkeeping section organises your house finances and does all the hard calculations for you. It’s the end of awkward messages reminding people to pay up. When you spend money on the house – paying for rent and bills or buying food – the app keeps a running tally of who owes what and makes the necessary splits.
The House Feed is a private social network for you and your housemates. We realised very 
early that houses just work when everybody talks. The House Feed keeps your house in touch, whether it’s organising a dinner or choosing a movie, you’ll know what’s happening in your house. Each task completed or bill paid appears in the House Feed, where you can like or comment on anything and write posts. It’s perfect for people with busy lives and differing schedules.
What is the most important thing users should get out of this app?
Our vision is to help create better relationships and more shared activity within the home. Quite simply, we want to make people’s domestic lives easier. We’re hoping that Fairshare will remove inter-personal tensions, encourage communication and provide users with equality of say and the ability to make equitable contributions.
I read that you are aiming to create your own (Fairshare) space in social networking – can you tell us more about that?
The house feed is essentially a private social network for your home. We feel like there is a space for a private network where you can share things that relate specifically to the needs of your home, rather than a public sphere such as Facebook. Most sharehouses are already using social networks to organise their homes, such as Facebook groups acting as a house noticeboards. Fairshare aims to centralise the systems you use to manage your share house, and all of the tasks and bookkeeping information flows through onto the House Feed.
The app is dedicated to people who share houses, but could parents for instance, use this to keep their kids doing their chores?
Most definitely, and it already has been in many cases. That said, the app in its current form is geared towards sharehouses with features like the bookkeeping section that probably aren’t that useful to families. However, we are looking at ways to easily customise the app for families so it can be of even greater use.
What has the feedback on the app been like so far?
The feedback has been really positive, especially from those using the iPhone version and from our power users. We’ve recently updated the app to make it more compatible with Android design conventions along with translating it into German, where we’ve had a lot of interest.
And, what can we look forward to in the future from you guys?
Whilst we will be looking at building out some new features within the app, our main focus is on improving the current feature set. We’re dedicated to creating the best possible sharehouse app for our users, and where we take Fairshare from here will depend upon feedback and how people are using it.
So, before you yell at your roommate for the dirty kitchen floor, perhaps take a look at Fairshare?
